The Clothes Make The Man
by turbomagnus
Summary: 'Yet Another Halloween Fic' short collection... Change Xander's costume and you change that Halloween, change it enough and it can change everything...


Summary: Halloween night left Xander with more than memories, it left him with a ship...

Disclaimer: "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Firefly" and all associated characters and situations are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit.

-o0O0o-

"The Clothes Make The Man"  
'Malcolm Reynolds'  
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'.

-o0O0o-

Love could make a ship fly when every force in nature said it shouldn't stay in the air. He'd said it plenty times; usually when someone - being Kaylee - started saying they needed new parts that they'd not had the money to get. It'd come close to not being enough a couple times, but never like it did now. Quite honestly, he was having trouble keeping from remembering that horrible moment in The Valley when Zoe'd given him the word from Command; no help was coming, they were surrendering, every man and woman who'd died there had died for nothing.

He'd thought everything had been lost then, he was wrong; he still had his freedom, he shortly after had a ship, and he had his hate for the Alliance to keep him warm at night. It'd kept him very warm a few years later after meeting the Tam siblings and learning that glassing civilians wasn't even the worst the Alliance would do. Here, with no Alliance, he didn't even have that. What he had was the body and memories of a man - a boy, really - he'd never met until a few nights ago and a _Firefly_ -class transport that was emptier than it'd ever been.

Xander Harris paused a moment with his hand on the railing and shook his head, that wasn't entirely right. Malolm Reynolds didn't have his memories, he had Mal's, they were just so much stronger than his own at the moment that it felt the other way around, especially here. Although it wasn't as though he had much, if anything, more than the former soldier turned freighter captain-slash-smuggler did if he actually stopped to think about the matter. It wasn't quite as bad as Mal's memories of being in a 'repatriation camp' after the war, but it came close in some ways. At least in that damn camp Mal'd been surrounded by fellow Independents; maybe not people he knew personally, maybe not fellow survivors of Serenity, but men and women who had sworn to live, fight and die for the same cause that he had, there'd been that bond between them. Browncoats all and damn the Alliance. Xander was standing alone, one man against the 'Verse. Contrary to what some poets might write, it was a lonely feeling, not a heroic one.

His best friend was dead, Turned and dusted over a year before; the fact that she'd dressed up for the corpse had proved he'd never have Buffy Summers; Willow's support for Buffy and deadboy meant he was losing his other best friend; and it wasn't as though the G-man had ever really liked him anyway. It seemed like the only thing he had was the strange relationship between him and 'Queen C' Cordelia Chase that, whatever the hell it was, made the thing between Mal and Inara look tame at times. Well, that and the ship that was currently sitting on Kingman's Bluff outside of the Sunnydale city limits.

Unfortunately, while he could, in a pinch, manage _Serenity_ on his own, it wasn't like there was anywhere for her to take him since, as far as he knew, there wasn't anywhere else but Earth-That...-Is, he supposed would probably be the right thing to call it now. Or if there were other inhabited worlds, they weren't inhabited by humans, leastwise not Earther ones, anyway. Of course, even in Mal's time and place, the only 'aliens' anyone knew of were sideshow attractions of mutant cow fetuses, so there was that too. Though thinking about it, Xander knew that demons existed even if they didn't seem to in Mal's 'Verse, so he couldn't really use that to be sure of anything. It was almost enough to make him wish for the simpler days when Federals and Vampires were bad, Independents and Slayers were good, and that was all anyone needed to know about anything. Simpler days, when there was only one set of memories to worry about having. These days he was a captain with a ship, but no crew, passengers, cargo or anywhere to take them even if he had them.

Xander shook his head, his thoughts just kept going around in circles and they were starting to get tiring. Worse still, the circles they were going in were all circling around one simple point; he had no one to keep him in Sunnydale and no where to go away from it. It wasn't like most science-fictions, the world Mal's memories and the ship had come from, there'd been no form of faster-than-light travel invented - no hyperspace, no Warp Speed, no Folds, no Jumps, nothing - all there had been was more efficent fusion drives for better sub-light speed and they wouldn't get him far out into The Black here. Truth was that he probably wouldn't make it outside the system, certainly not far enough to find out if there were actually other worlds inhabited by anything that needed a good cargo ship and its captain. He was more trapped here with the illusion of freedom from _Serenity_ and the sky than Mal had been in that prison camp with fences and guards keeping him there.

Strange how it wasn't until he was someone else with Mal's memories that he could see just how much a part the war buddies bond with Zoe and then the ones that had formed later with Wash, Kaylee and Jayne, even Book and Simon had helped to keep the former Sergeant-turned-smuggler sane. That wasn't even beginning to think about what Inara and River had done for him, in different ways. Despite all their arguing, that they never did anything about it, Inara reminded Mal he was a man with a man's feelings, wants, desires... River had been something different, though, as soon as he'd heard her story, she became the embodiment of everything he'd fought for in the war and proof that Command had surrendered, Serenity Valley had been lost, but the war was still going on and all he had to do was get back in the fight. It was too bad that it had cost the Shepard, Wash and too many other people their lives before Mal finally got it in him to do it. And even though Cordelia definitely could do the Inara thing and remind him he was a guy, Xander had to admit to himself that he didn't exactly have anyone to take River's place as Mal's Albatross for him.

He didn't know that four years in the future, a spell would be cast that would take reality, space and time and twist it in an attempt to spite a hellgoddess. He couldn't know that all of his worries and concerns in that moment would no longer exist, instead being replaced by memories of talking with a Dawn Summers who was dealing with having spent the previous night as River Tam. He wouldn't be aware that instead of being worried about his own feelings of growing distant from everyone, Xander would instead recall spending the first day of November, nineteen ninety-seven, trying to help Dawn deal with the fact that she still had River's abilities - telepathy, combat skills and even enhanced intelligence - despite the spell's end. It would never cross his mind in the spell-altered world that he didn't have anyone to fight for because Dawn would be there to be his Albatross...


End file.
